Welcome to brianmacintosh.com. I'm Brian MacIntosh, and I am a game programmer in the Orange County area of Southern California. This site serves to host and distribute some of my games and my blog, below.

I have developed games and apps for the XBox 360, Windows PC, iPad, Amazon Alexa, and Windows 7 Phone. I'm particularly interesting in procedural generation, pixel art, and emergent gameplay, and I'm looking forward to developing more games with these technologies.

Ludum Dare 30 Go Time

Just starting the first real day of coding for the 30th Ludum Dare. I started off this jam thinking of making some kind of simulation game - something where you, in a relatively low-pressure environment, could build up a system or a network and watch it do its work, like SimCity.

Justin and I had a short brainstorming session when the theme - Connected Worlds - was announced. They say to never go with your first idea - however, after considering two-screen tower-defense games, games where dinosaurs are attacking the modern world, games with constellations (I really liked that one and I hope some other people do it), and meeting Kevin Bacon, we eventually went with just that. This will be a game where you build up an interstellar shipping empire, moving goods between planets.

I also wanted to try to make use of multiple windows or views, and that goes well with theme. We're pretty sure we know what we are going to do with them. Early screenshot:

Ludum Dare #29 Complete

A few weeks ago, I participated in the 29th Ludum Dare. It has been a while, but not many posts, since I last participated in the Dare. The theme for this one was "Beneath the Surface".

I worked with Justin Britch on this one. We met just after the theme was announced to brainstorm. I really liked this theme - it evokes mystery and exploration, provides an easy setting (underground or underwater) to start with, and could simultaneously be tied into gameplay elements. While we thought it would have been a lot of fun to make "Ben Eath, the Surf Ace", we ultimately decided that we really wanted to go after the mystery, the thrill of exploration, fear of the unknown, and such themes. We also knew that we wanted to attempt to introduce some sort of narrative into the world.

The beginnings of the conversation system.

The design was ambitiously scoped for a jam, and I'm happy I was able to turn out so many features.

More conversation.

The Good: Dedicating time during the development process for polish worked well for the game. When polish gets left as a task for the end of the jam, there's often no time to actually do it. I didn't leave a feature until it was in a state it could stay in.

I also didn't run into too many momentum-killer problems. I've worked on several smaller projects using HTML5 and ThreeJS over the past few months, so I knew some of its quirks and was able to work continuously without getting stuck on strange bugs, even though the codebase for Thunder Fish pushed way past the size of my previous HTML games. Familiarity is key for jams, and it definitely pays off in the ability to continue grinding out features.

Learned: Yet again, I completely failed to allocate time for audio. Fortunately, I was already in the Jam category for this one, so I pulled some free music from NGXmusical in the last hour. Sound effects could have improved the feel even further, though.